Interview (Part 1): Wenonah Wilms

My interview with the 2018 Nicholl Fellowships in Screenwriting winner.

Wenonah Wilms wrote the original screenplay “Horsehead Girls” which won a 2018 Nicholl Fellowship in Screenwriting. Recently, I had the opportunity to chat with Wenonah about her background, her award-winning script, the craft of screenwriting, and what winning the Nicholl has meant to her.

Today in Part 1 of a 6 part series to run each day through Saturday, Wenonah and I talk about her background growing up in the Midwest, the interesting subculture of which she is a part, and how she found her way to screenwriting.

Scott Myers: Wenonah, you grew up in Minnesota. You still live there, right?

Wenonah Wilms: Yup, I do. I live in Minneapolis.

Scott: I think it’s fair to say, you took a rather circuitous route into screenwriting. Could you maybe talk about your background and how it was…I think it was one day, you were in your 30s. You picked up a book on screenwriting and began your writer’s journey.

Wenonah: I didn’t set out for it to be a crazy life-changing adventure. I was a stay-at-home mom, just turned 30, with three little boys under the age of five at the time, and looking for a hobby, which I think a lot of stay at home moms do. I needed something to feel more independent — something for me.

It’s a really silly story. I feel weird that I have to keep telling it, but it’s all I have. [laughs] Do you know “Project Greenlight”? That was the reality screenwriting show on HBO that starred Matt Damon and Ben Affleck.

Scott: Yes.

Wenonah: The first season had just come out and I was like, “Wow, Ben and Matt are pretty cool and cute. They seemed accessible and wanting to launch careers. What do I have to get on the show and hang out with them?”

Write a script? That sounded interesting. I wasn’t a writer. I liked movies, but I didn’t really love movies. I wasn’t into film as an art or anything like that, but this looked like something that I could do in my spare time. It’s really naive thinking back on it. I always get an inner cringe.

I looked up screenwriting and, for the first time, looked at a script, and thought, “I can do this.” I picked up a couple of books and just started reading and then I knew right away that what I had to do was start writing. I had my first feature written within a couple months. It sucked.

I kept rewriting that first script over the course of several years. I love that story so much and I won my first fellowship with that script. The story is very special to me.

I never did turn it into Project Greenlight. It wasn’t quite the genre they were looking for. That was the strange motivation to start this weird career. [laughs]

Scott: Ben Affleck and Matt Damon.

Wenonah: I know. I wish I had a better story. It’s embarrassing. No offense to them, it’s just not where most people’s passions start.

Scott: No. It’s a great story and I can just see where this is going to go. At some point, Affleck and Damon will end up producing something of yours and they’ll love that story.

Wenonah: Finally, everything in my life will be wrapped up in a bow and I’ll be happy.

Scott: Jumping back a bit, I think you said that you’d grown up loving movies. How and when did they become such an important part of your life?

Wenonah: It’s funny, because I like movies like everybody else, but I never really wanted to make movies or be involved in the industry in that way. I feel I like movies as much as anybody else does.

I grew up in the ’80s, so John Hughes and his films were really cool. I don’t know, everyone in every generation could probably say that, but I feel like everybody misses movies of the ‘80s.

I used to go to the video store and rent a VCR, have the three day rental and haul that thing back, try to hook it up to the TV. I don’t feel like I have an enormous or more than the average love of movies, but I do love screenwriting.

I love the format of the script. I love the rules and the language, and all that really clicked with me. It was years before I had a short film made. I think my first film I had made was in 2006, so it was about five or six years before I even had even seen what it was like to have something I wrote be on the screen.

Scott: That first script you wrote, I believe that’s the one that was inspired by your grandmother. Is that right?

Wenonah: Yes, correct.

Scott: That was in 2000, 2001?

Wenonah: About 2001.

Scott: I believe, if I’m not mistaken, in watching the video of Robin Swicord when she introduced you at the Nicholl ceremony, she said you’d 22 screenplays or something like that?

Wenonah: Yeah. I’ve written 22 features at this point.

Scott: That’s a little over one per year, which is a pretty good average. She said, Robin, in her comments that “Writers are in a way, all of us, autodidacts, and we teach ourselves how to write.” How did you teach yourself to write? You watched movies, you bought a few books. What else did you do?

Wenonah: I read a lot of scripts, as many as I could find at the time. 20 years ago the Internet was less generous with screenplays. I bought screenplays online. I bought screenplays on eBay. Just reading scripts and learning the language of screenwriting was the biggest teacher for me. Rereading my own things, going back and rewriting.

When you have 20 years to practice hopefully it all becomes second nature at some point. I do feel like I’m still learning. Every once in a while I’ll still pull out an old screenwriting book when I’m getting ready to write something new. It gets me motivated and ready to start staring at the blank page again.

Scott: Reading scripts, I couldn’t agree more. That’s one area that watching movies or TV, writing pages, those, seem maybe more natural. Reading scripts is like, “I got to sit down for two hours and all this.” There’s just some things you cannot learn I think or let me say it the other way. There are things you can learn best by reading scripts.

Wenonah: Yes, absolutely. I can’t remember which script it was, but just I sat down and copied it just to feel what that was like to hit the return and tab to dialog on a page; what it looked like and what it felt like. I don’t remember which exactly script that was. I did that early on, just copied another script onto my screen.

Scott: I believe that F. Scott Fitzgerald did that with a Charles Dickens novel like literally. I even think that Felix Mendelssohn the composer did that with a Bach thing. I’ve read something where they just wanted to get into the rhythm and flow of the source material.

Wenonah: Just to feel what it was like to write one without having to come up with the stops and the starts of creating it, which is what I do on the spot anyway. It was interesting.

Scott: You’re part of the Red Cliff Band of the Lake Superior Chippewa?

Wenonah: Correct.

Scott: You told the story. It was very moving when you said I want to thank the academy speech, which you got to say about your grandmother and her being pulled out of her home, kidnapped essentially as a five year-old.

People say it’s a great script, but nobody is going to make it. You said in your speech when you’ll spend the next 20 years writing alien and zombie movies or something like that. Is that right?

Wenonah: Yes. The very first screenplay was based on her life. She was a Dakota Indian. When she was young it was very common for the government to take Indian kids away from their families and place them in boarding schools. Basically kidnap them and take them as far away as they could from their home.

Their parents knew where they went, because all the kids were going. But, with very limited resources it was hard to visit their kids. They took them away, and then they wouldn’t see them for years.

I really had no idea of what she went through. When I was 18 or 19, she started handwriting stories of her life for our family. I had no idea that any of this had happened and certainly not to my Grandma. This was my family and I didn’t know.

My father gave me her essays after she had passed away. She was a school teacher, so she was a very good writer. It was very hard to go through them. I was very close to her — and I cried when I read them, thinking about what she must have gone through.

When I was looking for a story to write for my very first screenplay I thought, “Well, I just need something. I need to practice. I need to get going on some story. What I’m I going to do?” I thought about her stories and I thought this would be a really great way for me to honor her.

I didn’t want to rip off her stories, so I contemporized it. I changed it and made it my own. It was based around boarding school experiences. Now, I forgot like the second half of your question. [laughs]

Scott: Well, just that led you into…Because people said, “Oh, this is a good script.” In fact, you said you won a fellowship on it six years later, but they said, “There’s not going to be money to make this. Who’s going to star in it? There is not an audience for this.” That led you, I guess, maybe more would you say chasing the market?

Wenonah: Right, exactly. I did. I made some friends locally that were in the business, and they were like, “This is great. This is really cool. Nobody’s ever heard of this before. You have a unique voice.” But because the main actors were Native American women, one was an elder and one was a teenager, and that’s the problem. Who would even star in this?

Everyone in the business knows it’s who you get as an actor first and what attachments you can make. Who would want to direct this? Who was going to give money to this? While it became my greatest writing sample and my favorite script, honestly, it just wasn’t going to be a thing.

That was my big lesson. You need to write things that have a possibility of getting made. I’m not a director, I’m not rich, I can’t just make my own movies, and I knew that I was at the mercy of filmmakers and always will be. If I wanted to have a career, I needed to write something a little more mainstream.

After that, it was 15 or 16 years before I even touched another NativeAmerican themed story because I was trying so hard to not be the “Native American female screenwriter.” I wanted to be known as a good screenwriter first.

I guess I really took that idea and ran with it because coming back to Native themed scripts was hard for me. I wasn’t sure. It kind of bit me in the end last time, and I didn’t know if I should go there or not again, but things have changed thankfully.

Here is video of Wenonah accepting her 2018 Nicholl Award in December of last year:

Tomorrow in Part 2, Wenonah reveals the inspiration for her award-winning screenplay “Horsehead Girls” and its two central characters — a grown mother and adolescent daughter just making do on the fringes of society.

You can learn more about Wenonah at her website here.

For my interviews with every Nicholl Fellowships in Screenwriting winners since 2012, go here.

For my interviews with 53 Black List writers, go here.